Where I'm Calling From

had a job, didn’t I? Compared to her and everyone else in my family, I had it made. Compared to the rest, I lived on Easy Street.
    I sent the money she asked for. I sent money every time she asked. And then I told her I thought it’d be simpler if I just sent a sum of money, not a whole lot, but money even so, on the first of each month. It would be money she could count on, and it would be her money, no one else’s— hers and the kids’. That’s what I hoped for, anyway. I wished there was some way I could be sure the bastard who lived with her couldn’t get his hands on so much as an orange or a piece of bread that my money bought. But I couldn’t.
    I just had to go ahead and send the money and stop worrying about whether he’d soon be tucking into a plate of my eggs and biscuits.
    My mother and my daughter and my former wife. That’s three people on the payroll right there, not counting my brother. But my son needed money, too. After he graduated from high school, he packed his things, left his mother’s house, and went to a college back East. A college in New Hampshire, of all places. Who’s ever heard of New Hampshire? But he was the first kid in the family, on either side of the family, to even want to go to college, so everybody thought it was a good idea. I thought so, too, at first. How’d I know it was going to wind up costing me an arm and a leg? He borrowed left and right from the banks to keep himself going. He didn’t want to have to work a job and go to school at the same time. That’s what he said. And, sure, I guess I can understand it. In a way, I can even sympathize. Who likes to work? I don’t.
    But after he’d borrowed everything he could, everything in sight, including enough to finance a junior year in Germany, I had to begin sending him money, and a lot of it. When, finally, I said I couldn’t send any more, he wrote back and said if that was the case, if that was really the way I felt, he was going to deal drugs or else rob a bank—whatever he had to do to get money to live on. I’d be lucky if he wasn’t shot or sent to prison.
    I wrote back and said I’d changed my mind and I could send him a little more after all. What else could I do? I didn’t want his blood on my hands. I didn’t want to think of my kid being packed off to prison, or something even worse. I had plenty on my conscience as it was.
    That’s four people, right? Not counting my brother, who wasn’t a regular yet. I was going crazy with it. I worried night and day. I couldn’t sleep over it. I was paying out nearly as much money every month as I was bringing in. You don’t have to be a genius, or know anything about economics, to understand that this state of affairs couldn’t keep on. I had to get a loan to keep up my end of things. That was another monthly payment.
    So I started cutting back. I had to quit eating out, for instance. Since I lived alone, eating out was something I liked to do, but it became a thing of the past. And I had to watch myself when it came to thinking about movies. I couldn’t buy clothes or get my teeth fixed. The car was falling apart. I needed new shoes, but forget it.
    Once in a while I’d get fed up with it and write letters to all of them, threatening to change my name and telling them I was going to quit my job. I’d tell them I was planning a move to Australia. And the thing was, I was serious when I’d say that about Australia, even though I didn’t know the first thing about Australia. I just knew it was on the other side of the world, and that’s where I wanted to be.
    But when it came right down to it, none of them really believed I’d go to Australia. They had me, and they knew it. They knew I was desperate, and they were sorry and they said so. But they counted on it all blowing over before the first of the month, when I had to sit down and make out the checks.
    After one of my letters where I talked about moving to Australia, my mother wrote that she didn’t want to be a burden any longer. Just as soon as the swelling went down in her legs, she said, she was going out to look for work. She was seventy-five years old, but maybe she could go back to waitressing, she said. I wrote her back and told her not to be silly. I said I was glad I could help her. And I was. I was glad I could help. I just needed to win the lottery.
    My daughter knew Australia was just a way of saying to everybody that I’d had it. She knew I needed a break and something to